twelve, when he loved a girl of eighteen "with large eyes and pink
shoes"--Estelle, _Stella mentis, Stella matutina_. These words--perhaps
the saddest he ever wrote--might serve as an emblem of his life, a life
that was a prey to love and melancholy, doomed to wringing of the heart
and awful loneliness; a life lived in a hollow world, among worries that
chilled the blood; a life that was distasteful and had no solace to
offer him in its end.[15] He has himself described this terrible "_mal
de l'isolement_," which pursued him all his life, vividly and
minutely.[16] He was doomed to suffering, or, what was worse, to make
others suffer.

[Footnote 13: _Mémoires_, I, 11.]

[Footnote 14: Julien Tiersot, _Hector Berlioz et la société de son
temps_, 1903, Hachette.]

[Footnote 15: See the _Mémoires_, I, 139.]

[Footnote 16: "I do not know how to describe this terrible sickness....
My throbbing breast seems to be sinking into space; and my heart,
drawing in some irresistible force, feels as though it would expand
until it evaporated and dissolved away. My skin becomes hot and tender,
and flushes from head to foot. I want to cry out to my friends (even
those I do not care for) to help and comfort me, to save me from
destruction, and keep in the life that is ebbing from me. I have no
sensation of impending death in these attacks, and suicide seems
impossible; I do not want to die--far from it, I want very much to live,
to intensify life a thousandfold. It is an excessive appetite for
happiness, which becomes unbearable when it lacks food; and it is only
satisfied by intense delights, which give this great overflow of feeling